Eye/SSC are supposed to be parallel content, though. So VR/Alar/HAS being easier than Leo is acceptable under any definition.

Regarding the gear progression issue.

I happen to subscribe to the "D should remain (roughly) equal" school of thought. If D decreases, as appears to be the case with BT then the only purpose SSC/TK serves is a massive keying 'quest'. Personally, I enjoy improving my character as well as the "because it is there!" factor of conquering new bosses. I do want to be prepared, and find it discouraging that apparently I am prepared enough right now, but just not allowed to try it. Considering the time and effort so far spent on the T5 content, I would like to think it has a bit more meaning than simply another Naaru Trial type hoop to jump.

Of course, one should not forget the negative aspects of building content on top of content either. We found ourselves in the unfortunate position to loose a significant number of our healers during Naxxramas, forcing us to reach ever deeper into the past for gear, in order to have any hopes of progressing. Even farming Ragnaros for T2 pants was suggested. You can all imagine how things might end up if you try to farm 3+ raid instances worth of bosses each week, and still try to find time to actually do new content. That sort of situation burns out people rapidly.

So, if you want to maintain a steady D, you might need to look in new directions not only for keying, but also for gearing. The new Nether Vortex BoE patterns could be such a mechanism, providing the raid bank could collect the instance only materials..

I am fascinated by the difference you describe between cutting edge and casual guilds. How far in terms of progression is your current casual guild?

I don't consider myself a casual raider. I love to raid and regret not having done more raiding pre-BC. My first "main" turned 60 some time after Naxx was released, having just rolled on a wholly new server that only ever got as far as a couple guilds killing Prophet Skeram within weeks of BC's release.

That said my guild just now entering SSC and working on Hydross. In terms of server progression we're the only guild on the server to kill Magtheridon as of yet. Certainly we are not "cutting edge." But looking at the WoW raiding community as a whole we surely must be average. Does this mean that we are bad, as you described?

It's really depressing hearing so many people recall such fond memories of Naxx - "the best raiding zone ever." It's something I missed entirely for having joined the game late and on a new server. I thought, naively, that BC would level the field and give the guilds on my server a chance to progress in high end content. I'd love to complete the content BC has to offer before the next expansion arrives but considering the difference between cutting edge and average guilds, BT seems like a million miles away and I begin to doubt that it will happen.

I really think a lot of it comes down to smaller raid sizes. There's simply a lot less that can go wrong, and a lot less that can be done when designing an encounter around 25 people compared to 40

I forget who it was who made the analogy (Gurg maybe), but I'm pretty certain that the four horsemen wouldn't have taken nearly as long to die if they were the 2.5 horsemen instead

Black Temple still isn't designed around the "average consumer". Kael is still a fairly tough fight to learn, and even Vashj is much harder than Rag was

also, include your server in your profile

There's SOME hard fights in BT, obviously, but it has no real ramping up or risk/reward that the other instances before it had/have. Seeing Curse not 'instantly' kill Illidan was a little refreshing at least, it just goes to show that Nihilum really did put in.. a.. lot.. of effort!

It's just gonna feel like; coast long on a loot rollercoaster, focus for a hard fight, rollercoaster some more, then another hard fight.

As for Hyjal, I think tuning Hyjal is going to be much, much, much more difficult because of the trash it takes to get to the bosses. Balancing 8-12 waves of very varying mob types (past the Human base) vs different raid compositions, and then fighting a boss right after is probably a lot more time consuming and hard than just tuning a solo boss! So to make people not pull their hair out at how impossible and futile it seems, they likely purposely made most of the bosses quite easy while they figure out how they want the trash to work.

Yes, really, I think the majority of mages created their character thinking it to be the "glass cannon" class. In other words, the highest absolute damage yet the most fraile of all classes.

Sadly, it seems that warlocks who have nearly 3k-4k more hp, higher survivability -and- a pet is doing more damage, and it just doesn't make any sense whatsoever in my mind.

Does that *really* belong in this thread? It's not related whatsoever.

Me personally, am quite satisfied with the new approach. Often in vanilla, farming the instance over and over did get to me quite badly. I did not enjoy it whatsoever after the 10th time of doing the same farming over and over. So this new approach is welcomed by me, however the difficulty level on BT seems a bit off for being the last zone in TBC. Granted, they might pull out a few tricks but Illidan was supposed to be TBCs boss. The whole TBC revolves around Illidan ruling Outland whilst fighting against the Burning Legion. And yeah, he's dead already. I would've expected to take a little longer, at least.

I realise that not killing Kel'Thuzad must've sucked. I killed him pre-TBC, but I know a lot of people who didn't and I feel sorry for them. Everyone (or well.. almost everyone) should have a chance to see the pinnacle of each instance really. I know this is near impossible to tune, so I think Blizzard needs to find something in between the two extremes we have now - Kel'Thuzad vs Illidan. Kel'Thuzad was an epic fight. No doubt. I don't even concider thinking Illidan isn't. But the whole buildup around getting to Kel'Thuzad was great.
People killed a lot in the first month of Naxxramas, but then it started staggering and we ended up with top guilds claiming encounters to be impossible. Then a few weeks later, this same guild kills this so called impossible boss. That's amazing. That's also spot on tuning. Four Horsemen was a really good fight, if you could afford the stacking. Bleeding edge guilds could, but many couldn't. This is why Kel'Thuzad was so far out of reach for many guilds. I know we ended up having the warrior accounts shared throughout the guild, just for the sake of practice. Heck, I even used 2 different accounts while we practiced them.
Let's not forget Loatheb - At start looked impossible, but then people realised you needed the consumables. A retarded mechanism in many ways, maybe, but it worked. Once the strat was out, people killed him in one night of practice - easily. All you had to do is buff up and go for it.
Sapphiron was a stop too - you needed X amount of Frozen Runes to craft everyones gear. Therefor you needed Y time spent inside Naxxramas. Or a lot of help from other guilds.
Kel'Thuzad was an execution and took a lot less long to learn, but it was very well done.

I remember going "Ooh!" "Aaah!" when DnT or Nihilum downed a new boss in Naxxramas. Frankly, for BT - I don't care. It has less of an epic feel to it now that they breezed through it like that.

I'm not quite sure how much Naxxramas was tested, but it was surely not tested as much as Black Temple was. I mean, we had well over a month of raids going in there daily, which I'm positive we didn't have with Naxxramas. I doubt Loatheb was tested, I doubt anything past Razuvious was tested too. I don't think Patchwerk got killed either. And so forth.
We had 7 bosses killed on PTRs for Black Temple however, I believe. That's a massive difference. I think Gurg is spot on with the reasoning behind why it's so easy, though. The gear buff was pretty late and I think Blizzard reasoned it wouldn't be necessary to re-evaluate the encounters.

I wouldn't call it a mistake. Maybe now more than 10% of the WoW raiding community will get to see the pinnacle of Black Temple. A wise decision, I believe.

Warlocks should do more damage than mages or you fall into the pre 2.0 naxx train of thought with minmax raids throwing a warlock in a raid for ele/tank imp/healthstones and mage mage mage mage mage mage. I agree that having destro spec nukelocks or SL locks outdpsing a fire mage is pretty idiotic but really an affliction warlock with the available debuff slots for maximum dps simply has to the better DPSer since the class limits its own slots pretty much whereas mages don't.

Alright, I accept to be wrong on that point.

As I mentioned, I liked Naxxramas too. I was one of the people that got to witness the whole thing and as until today, I still mention it to new people in the guild how great it was. Killing Kel'Thuzad was such an epic feeling, gave so much adrenaline for me the first kill that it was not even funny. Adrenaline rushes over computer games, imagine that!

Not to mention the lore around the actual thing too. I was the first person to gather Atiesh in our guild and I was just in love with the way that was built up. It even sent you back to in my humble opinion the second best encounter in the game, C'thun. The actual Splinter collecting was fun too, although a bit farfetched
Why the hell would Kel hand over splinters of the most powerful caster weapon in existence to the likes of Anub, Maexxna, Gluth, Loatheb and so forth? I could imagine the humanoids, as they had some sort of role - Faerlina being the 'recruitment officer', Noth being his personal necromancer together with Heigan being more attracted to the cult side of things, Razuvious is the one in command of the recruits and Gothik was another Necromancer. Four Horsemen was self-explanatory, as they were his most powerful deadknights.

Black Temple and to an extent SSC are missing that. Who the hell is Morogrim and what is he doing there? He doesn't even fit through the freaking entrance!
Why is Leotheras in SSC? What is the Lurker and how did he get there? What is Hydross' role in the scheme of things? I can only suppose he's there to purify the water for the Naga as they want to keep control of all water in Outlands - as explained by Vashj.
I guess Karathress and the Fathom-Guard are just a few of Vashj's lieutenants, but not much else you can account them for.

As for Black Temple...
I can imagine Naj'entus being one of Vashj's commanders and residing in the Black Temple - for whatever purpose really =/
Supremus? Why? How? What for?
Why's Teron Gorefiend in Black Temple? He's a Dead Knight, no? Why would he follow Illidan's orders?
Essence of Souls don't really fulfill a purpose either - unless I missed something..
And so forth...

[Edit: Sorry for the derail.]

What this comes down to is this:

Pre-TBC, a 4-5 day raiding guild with 30 skilled players probably was going to get most of the way thru naxx, getting halted at either loatheb or gothik/4h near the end of vanilla, maybe making minor progress. The hardcore had about 2 months to farm KT to gear up for leveling.

In TBC, the dynamic is different. The hardcore will have 6+ months to farm. Yet the raid size is smaller. These guilds will literally have nothing to do for 3+ months unless new 25 man content is added.

On the other hand, the 4.5 day raiding guilds such as mine will have a much more comfortable pace. With 6 months to go, we are at kael. It will likely take us 2-3 months to get all of BT down, assuming we allocate roughly half our time to new content and half to farm. Add another month for Hyjal, most probably for archimonde, and that figures to be 3-4 months till we finish all content. Thus we get 2-3 months to farm content, unless new stuff is added. More appropriately, if they add new stuff in 3 months, we'll be ready to do it, whereas a similar guild pre-TBC would not have.

Basically, TBC has allowed the slightly less hardcore, but still not casual guilds to ascend up a tier or two in progression, but has allowed the super-hardcore to frankly devastate the games content. The casuals are never going to see BT, just like they never saw KT, because of the key requirements and kael/vashj.

Honestly, I think this is good long term for most of us. When we are just farming BT/Hyjal 2-3 days a week, can anyone say they won't find something to do with that extra 2 days off?

Having both EU and US accounts, I've played on both EU and US PTR's, I'd like to comment that the PTR for Naxx was awful for the first 2 weeks, Cubes (those buggy cubes for graphic bugs), random crashes, people running around with premades playing classes they never played before causing server lag, servers having 2k+ queues and that time we had the problem of "Another character with that name already exists" making it impossible to get back on time when you get DC'ed or kicked out.
However, on BT PTR, i've noticed that it went smooth, not much lag as Naxx's PTR, way less peeps just PvPing with the free shiny purples.